Thursday, May 31, 2012

Hundreds of Jews died through the incompetence and neglect of the Joint, charges Esther Meir-Glitzenstein

The conventional view of Operation Magic Carpet holds that from June 1949 to September 1950, nearly 50,000 Yemenite Jews travelled through space and time from the backward nation of Yemen to be redeemed in the modern and advanced State of Israel. According to a new book by Esther Meir-Glitzenstein, the operation was a case of serious mismanagement by the Joint (JDC), who failed to treat the sick and hungry. Some 850 refugees died before they even got to Israel. Article in Haaretz. My comment is below (with thanks: Lily):

In "The Exodus of the Yemenite Jews − A Failed Operation and a Formative Myth," published by Resling, Dr. Esther Meir-Glitzenstein reveals the how this mythic larger-than-life rescue operation was actually organized and describes the heavy toll it exacted upon the people it intended to save.

The story of the Yemenite aliyah was intentionally spun as an enchanting fairy tale in order to mask that it actually didn't go well at all, explains Meir-Glitzenstein, a senior lecturer at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

No fewer than 700,000 Jews reached Israel during the state's first years. What made the aliyah from Yemen unique among the early waves of immigration was the heavy death toll, she says.

"The Yemenite immigrants arrived hungry and sick at the transit camp set up for them in the Yemenite port city of Aden, after having walked hundreds of kilometers," she says. But the camp didn't have the facilities to care for them.

About 700 of the Jewish migrants died at the camp were buried in an adjacent cemetery. An additional 150 travelers, suffering from a lack of basic necessities on the journey, died between the border of the British-controlled Protectorate of Aden and North Yemen.

Then when the immigrants reached Israel, the fatalities continued. Post-immigration infant mortality rates ran high. While the myth-spinners of Operation Magic Carpet chalked up these tragedies to the difficult situation in Yemen, the book reveals that the deaths were actually a result of disastrous management. Refugees died, Meir-Glitzenstein says, because of incompetent planning, apathy and abandonment.

Who was responsible for this tragedy?

"The exodus of Jews from Yemen was planned with the cooperation of imam of Yemen who ruled North Yemen, the British authorities in Aden, the State of Israel, the Jewish Agency and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Every party played a role in the tragedy," Meir-Glitzenstein says. "The imam, who profited hugely from property and confiscatory taxes levied on the Jewish community, didn't lift a finger to help his subjects, who were desperate for aid. The British didn't help either."

But the lion's share of the blame lies with the Joint Distribution Committee, Meir-Glitzenstein says.

From the moment the rescue effort began, she contends, the JDC took control - and subsequently failed at every single point.

A scheduled airlift did not arrive on time. There wasn't enough shelter, food or medicine for the displaced Jews. Perhaps most egregiously, Meir-Glitzenstein says, the JDC abandoned thousands of Jews in the barren desert that straddles the North Yemen-Aden border.

As for assistance that did arrive, it was too little, too late.

But the JDC is not the only culpable party. "The Israeli government agreed to let the JDC handle the operation," Meir-Glitzenstein says. "That means that they, too, shared some of the blame for this tragedy."

How did this fiasco became a basic myth, one tied to the religious notions of salvation and national redemption?

That would be because of classic propaganda, says Meir-Glitzenstein.

"At the height of the aliyah from Yemen, the leadership of the JDC sent a press release to the media, describing Operation Magic Carpet as a successful rescue operation that brought the Jews of Yemen back to their ancestral homeland," she says. And the heavy price paid by the immigrants? Conveniently left out. Also not mentioned were mistakes in implementation and unfulfilled promises.

"The organizers of the mission were depicted as saviors," Meir-Glitzenstein says. "The mass exodus of Yemenite Jews was explained in terms of a messianic awakening among a religious community that spent 2,000 years longing for redemption. The religio-messianic myth was later ascribed to subsequent waves of immigration from Muslim countries."

Is there a conspiracy of silence surrounding this issue?

Of sorts, yes, Meir-Glitzenstein says. According to her research, three separate Knesset committees reviewed the operation. They discovered that some of the Israelis stationed in Aden, including senior JDC staffers, engaged in black-market smuggling. They knew the immigrants suffering but didn't care. Some staffers went so far as to beat the pilgrims with clubs and steal what little property they had managed to take with them.

In response to the Knesset inquiries, the JDC replaced their representatives in Aden. "But not a single JDC staffer was ever indicted," Meir-Glitzenstein says.

And it's not as if the abuses were a secret. "Many people outside the JDC were aware of what was going on, among them Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and other senior government ministers," she says. "Everyone kept silent. Maybe they wanted to protect the State of Israel, since it was so new, and maybe they were concerned about the reputation of the JDC, which played a big part in bringing Jews to Israel and helping them settle."

How did the aliyah narrative of Yemenite Jewry affect their absorption into Israeli society?

Approximately 30,000 sick and battered immigrants arrived from Yemen, but Israelis, Meir-Glitzenstein says, was under the impression that conditions in Yemen were to blame.

Among the sick were 3,000 infants in grave condition. Israel was not equipped to provide treatment.

And after all that, since Israeli society was under the impression that it had saved these immigrants and brought them to a better place, Israelis expected gratitude.

"Even today in Israel, no one understands the price these immigrants paid," Meir-Glitzenstein says. "There is not a single monument in Israel dedicated to those who died on the journey from Yemen. They have been erased both from historical memory and public consciousness."

My comment: it is no secret that the Jews in Yemen were in a sorry state of health and malnourishment when they arrived, many of them on foot, in the Yemen transit camps before being airlifted to Israel - as were an earlier wave of immigrants. And a number who survived the journey did not survive long in the Israeli transit camps. If one assumes that the death toll was around one in fifty, it was proportionately less than the 4,000 Ethiopian Jews who never made it to Israel on Operation Moses decades later, dying of starvation and disease in the Sudan and in transit camps. Can all the Yemenite deaths be blamed on the Joint's incompetence? Even if the JDC staffers did engage in black-market smuggling, it seems a bit harsh of Mrs Meir-Glitzenstein to put all blame on the JDC for failing to cure disease and prevent all loss of life.

Wednesday, May 30, 2012

A synagogue in Algeria. The last remaining synagogue in Algiers was desecrated in 1988.

There are almost no Jews left in Algeria: the last Jewess assisted by the Joint Distribution Committee, Mrs Esther Azoulay, passed away in July 2011, bringing to a close the JDC's programme in that troubled country, its CEO Steve Schwager writes. Before 1962, Algeria had 160,000 Jews. There may still be a handful left surviving without assistance (with thanks: Andrew):

According to some scholars, Jewish life in Algeria probably dates back nearly 2,600 years, to the time of the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem in 586 B.C.E. So Penny and I feel that it is of special importance to note that this past July, the last Jew in Algeria assisted by JDC, Mrs. Esther Azoulay, passed away.

Her passing brings JDC's direct program involvement in that troubled country to a close after a period of 60 years. And how did that work begin?

JDC’s connection started with its support for the Refugee Welfare Committee, which was established in Algeria in 1943 in order to bring assistance to European Jews who found asylum there during WWII. Later, when the State of Israel came into being, JDC also supported the aliyah of Jews from Algeria. However, in 1953, the Federation of Jewish Communities of Algeria felt that JDC should expand its programs for the Jews of Algeria in both the social and cultural arenas, and a JDC office was finally opened in Algiers in 1957.

JDC provided assistance in many areas: home visits to the needy, support for the development of educational institutions, medical care, cash assistance, and food packages, including matzot for Pesach. By 1959, 4,000 Jews were benefiting from JDC’s aid. In addition, JDC helped strengthen Jewish life in Algeria by supporting the construction of a rabbinical school and Jewish summer camps.

Even prior to 1962, when Algeria achieved its independence, Jews in Algeria had been facing hostility from certain segments of both the local French and Arab population. And once the French departed, Algerian rule was marked by militant Arab nationalism, growing Islamization, and virulent anti-Zionism. By the end of 1963, the 120,000-member community had dwindled to some 3,000-4,000 Jews.

In 1964, Mr. Choucroun, President of the Jewish community of Saïda, sent the following letter to Dr. Franco Levi, the JDC representative in Algeria:

At the time when I am preparing to leave Algeria, I would like to say once again how much I am grateful to the organization you represent and for your good deeds. You saved people in distress … thanks to your actions, children and elderly smiled at life. There do not remain any more poor people in Saïda.

The story of the final desecration/destruction of the last remaining synagogue in Algiers in 1988 makes stomach-churning reading even today. The damage done was so extensive that the synagogue, now in ruins, had to be permanently closed. By the end of the eighties, only 94 Jews remained in the country.

In the mid-1990’s the assassination of two Jews in Algiers marked the end of an era.

JDC remained a pillar of strength, providing assistance to those who needed help even as the community continued to shrink.

Since 1985, Line Meller, then living in Algiers, served as JDC’s liaison with the remaining Jews of Algeria.On our behalf she helped to assure the welfare of a small number of aged and impoverished Jews, who continued to receive cash assistance from JDC until they passed away.

Although JDC could not redeem these unfortunate Jews from their suffering since they did not want to emigrate, the work that JDC did kept them alive. JDC enabled Line Meller to light a candle in a black hole of darkness.

In 2010, Mr. Messaoud Chetrit, 82-years-old and the last Jewish man still living in Oran, passed away. A delegation of Jews came from France to ensure that he was buried according to the traditional Jewish ritual in the very cemetery of Oran where he had been the final caretaker.

And that brings us to the last Jew in Algeria assisted by JDC, Mrs. Azoulay, who had a very difficult life. In 1992, her case came to the attention of JDC, which from that point on provided her with regular cash assistance. Over a period of two decades, this JDC aid enabled Mrs. Azoulay to pay for all the medical care she needed for her multiple ailments. But perhaps what she treasured most about this JDC connection was the reassurance it gave her that she had not been forgotten by her people.Read article in full

One wonders why she came to this subject in the first place: I suspect it was to prove that Jews were collaborators with the settler-coloniser French, who conquered Algeria in 1830. Her original intention had been to demonstrate Jewish participation in the right-wing pied noir pro-French OAS movement, until her research showed the Jews were also courted by the pro-independence FLN.

The Jews do not fit the fashionable paradigm of colonisers versus colonised. Miss Choi seems to have discovered quite recently - from her friend Susan - that Jews had been in Algeria since Roman times (in fact, as early as 600 BCE). What she hasn't grasped is that the Jews were indigenous, preceding the Arab Muslims in Algeria by several hundred years. As a 'Europeanist', Miss Choi betrays her ignorance of Jewish history when she says 'quite a lot of Berbers and Arabs were converts to Judaism'. Berbers may well have converted to Judaism at first, but the overwhelming majority of Jewish and Christian Berbers would have in turn been converted to Islam; and no Arabs converted to Judaism - on the contrary, thousands of Jews were lost to Islam.

She describes how these Jews clung to the French citizenship granted to them by the 1870 Cremieux Decree. She correctly identifies the trauma of being stripped of their French citizenship by the Vichy regime during WW2.

But missing from her analysis is the main reason why the Jews of Algeria held on to their French citizenship: it was not just a matter of acculturation - ceasing to speak or dress like Arabs. Citizenship allowed them to escape centuries of dhimmitude, in which Jews were humiliated as inferiors by the local Muslims.

The word 'dhimmi' does not so much as escape Miss Choi's lips. She doesn't seem to grasp that the Jews are the 'colonised' of the 'colonised' Muslims.

Moreover, it is not true to suggest that French citizenship was only offered to Jews. As late as 1865, it was also offered to the Muslims of Algeria. The latter refused it because it would mean submitting to French civil law.

Miss Choi does not effectively convey the soul-searching that went on in the Jewish community before 1870 : the rabbis lobbied against French citizenship, fearing inevitable assimilation and weakening of religious and cultural ties (this actually came to pass). At first only 5 percent of the Jews welcomed citizenship. The Decret Cremieux was eventually imposed on the community, mainly for domestic electoral reasons.

Of course, acquiring French citizenship exposed the Jews to antisemitic hostility from the pieds noirs on the one hand, and resentment from the Algerian Muslims on the other, who suddenly had fewer rights and lower status. The antisemitism culminated in the wartime statut de Vichy. French citizenship was only restored in 1943, a year after the Allies had liberated North Africa, because the Allies had wished to appease the Vichy officers who still ran the Algerian army.

Sung Choi does not give her audience much of an inkling of the dilemmas facing Algerian Jews with the outbreak of the Algerian war in the 1950s. The community tried to maintain neutrality between the OAS and the FLN, but what Miss Choi euphemistically calls 'hostilities' forced the Jews to throw in their lot with the pieds noirs. With their French citizenship restored, it was obvious that efforts to coax the Algerian Jews to Israel would fail. But some 14,000 Algerian Jews, out of 160,000 did flee to Israel.

The trouble with academics nowadays is that they try to fit their conclusions into preconceived notions: one of the most pernicious is that Jews were accomplices of European colonialism. In order to convince, they have to leave out half the story: the historic oppression of the Jewish natives by Arab Muslims.

Monday, May 28, 2012

I never really gave liquorice much thought until I met Victoria. This lady in her 80s had lived in Iran until 1979. Her late husband's business was to harvest the roots of the vast numbers of liquorice plants which grow naturally near the Iranian town of Kermanshah, and to sell the liquorice to be processed into food, for tobacco or for its medicinal properties.

As Israel was a major client of his - Iran then had excellent relations with the Jewish state - Victoria's husband lost no time in bundling his family out of the country as soon as the Shah was deposed and the Islamic Republic of Iran declared. The family abandoned their house, their business, everything.

A few years later, in London, Victoria and her husband went to the Iranian embassy to register their lost assets. They drew up a will in order to bequeath their property to their children. The embassy officials were mystified as to why they had left in the first place. Their house was now a police station, but the thought of turning up on the doorstep and ordering the policemen out was rather improbable. The chances of their children ever reclaiming the family property were just as remote.

Victoria knew of no refugee from the Islamic regime - Jewish or non-Jewish - who had managed to get compensation or restitution.

She knew of families split between Israel and Iran - the children who stayed behind to run the family business while the parents went to Israel. Letters addressed to 'Occupied Palestine' reached their destination, although it is not known if they were censored along the way. Jews in Iran could not make direct calls to Israel from their homes, but had to go to call centres, where presumably their conversations would be monitored.

Victoria, whose family came originally from Iraq, had nothing but pleasant memories of her life under the Shah. But indigenous Iranian Jews had longer memories of persecution, and were more wary in their relationships with Muslims.

Iraq wants the Jewish archive returned: it is being restored in Washington after being found soaking in the Secret Police basement in Baghdad

With thanks: Qumran Qumran; Janet

Shavuot (Pentecost) was traditionally the festival when the Jews of Iraq performed 'ziyara' - the pilgrimage to the tomb of Ezekiel at al-Kifl. Writing in the Hebrew mediumG-Planet Guy Bechor has performed his own 'ziyara', revisiting the parlous state of Iraq's Jewish heritage. He is not hopeful: Iraq's Jewish treasures could be lost for ever. Here is a rough summary in English of Bechor's important piece.

Saddam Hussein, the dictator of Baghdad built himself a private museum of Jewish books and artefacts. The lost Jewish community continued to haunt him like a ghost.

The first news of the Jewish archive came from the head of the Israel-Palestine department of the secret police. After the US invasion of 2003, he told US officials - among them Harold Rhode - a scholar fluent in both Hebrew and Arabic - that he knew where a very rare Talmud from the 7th c. was kept. The screams of the tortured could be heard all around from the adjoining room in the Mukhabarat dungeons. The Americans dropped a half-ton bomb on the building. It did not explode, but water and sewage filled the basement, soaking a vast collection of Jewish holy books published in Leghorn, Jerusalem, Smyrna, Vilna, Warsaw, Baghdad, Torah scrolls and parchment, the oldest from 1568 - books used by the great rabbis of Babylon.

The most interesting archives, however, were from the 20th century, up to to 1953, and include a list of Jewish-owned properties, academic registers, school reports to the Ministry of Education, the chronicles of an ethnically-cleansed community which had shaped Judaism itself. The collection was looted from synagogues in 1950 and especially the attic of the Meir Shemtob synagogue in central Baghdad.

Jewish organisations had hope that the discovery of the Jewish archives would had led to the restoration of cemeteries and heritage, but everything is dissolving in Iraq today. The window for foreigners to visit has closed, and the shrines of Ezekiel at al-Kifl and Ezra the Scribe near Basra have been turned into mosques. Nobody cares.

As most Jewish archives would have been buried, Guy Bechor felt there was an opportunity to discover the very roots of Judaism, but when he broached the subject with (Prime Minister) Ariel Sharon, Sharon was not interested. The Israeli government was always fire-fighting and lost Jewish treasures in the Arab world were the very lowest of its priorities.

The US government are in no hurry to return the Jewish archive found in the Mukhabarat basement, now in Washington for restoration, but the Iraqi Government, which fought the US on the backs of the Jews and their heritage, suddenly has this burning desire to see the Jewish archive returned - it's their heritage, they claim.

What an impertinence when the collection was looted from its rightful owners. Guy Bechor suggests that the collection should go to the heirs of the Iraqi-Jewish community in Israel, or at least be accessible to them.

Sunday, May 27, 2012

Professor Shmuel Moreh, emeritus professor in Arabic literature at the Hebrew University

This Shavuot marks 71 years since the outbreak of the pro-Nazi pogrom in Iraq known as the Farhud. Professor Shmuel Moreh will not allow the event to be forgotten:

Jihad is considered no less important than the five pillars of Islam (أركان الإسلام) but this aspect of militant Islam had been neglected during the first decades of the 20th century: The testimony to the unity of Allah and Muhammad is His Prophet, prayer, fasting, charity and pilgrimage were the essence of Islam. The cause of such neglect was not only European military and industrial power, but also the fact that Arab Hashemite Hejaz family led by Sharif Hussein Ben Ali and his sons Princes Faisal and Abd - Allah cooperated with the British and French Powers, against the Caliph, the religious head of the Ottoman Empire, the protector of Islam. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt preached to restore the Jihad, "the forgotten pillar" of Islam.

Muslims found many similarities between Nazi doctrine and Islamic military power: the rise of Islam as a doctrine which united all the Arab tribe, by a charismatic leader, which must be spread by the sword, protects its followers against hellfire. The British, who saw the rich oil wells of Iraq as a strategic area of utmost importance, always strove to maintain friendly relations with the Hashemite family. Therefore, they crowned Prince Faisal king of Iraq.

Britain's agreements with the new state fanned the hatred of nationalists in the secular Iraqi army. With the founding of Iraq in 1921, most army officers studied in the German military and education system in Ottoman Turkey. The Nazi doctrine advocated force, racism and superiority of the Aryan race and favored Germany and hatred of Jews. King Ghazi, who hated the British because they betrayed his grandfather's Sharif Hussein Ben Ali dream to establish a new Arab empire, was disappointed with British support of the Jewish national home in Eretz Yisrael. Therefore, the young King worked to cement a friendship with Hitler and founded the Fituwwa, an Iraqi youth paramilitary organization in the fashion of Hitler Youth scouts.

The organization was taken over by exiled Palestinians in Iraq. It spread hatred of Jews and harassed them in the streets. Sunni Palestinians took over the school system and replaced Iraqi Shi'ites. The predominance of Jews in commerce and in the new state as directors of financial departments of all Iraqi ministries, bookkeepers and financial policy makers' advisers to the British in the running of Iraq's economy, aroused the envy and hatred of the people. The incitement was fuelled by the Palestinian students at the School of the Templars, who were hostile to the British for the Balfour Declaration.

In the midst of the Second World War the Germans sought to control the Iraqi oil wells. They promised air support and political patronage to the Iraqi nationalist officers. The Palestinians, headed by the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al - Husseini, were given a free hand. Palestinians and Syrians exiles incited the masses against the Jews in the press, in radio broadcasts and educational institutions.

On the advice of Haj Amin al - Husseini, they surrounded the British Army Air Force base at Habbaniya in western Iraq. Major Glubb Pasha (G. John Bagot) engineered a British counterattack. Defeating the Iraqi forces at Khaan Nuqta, fifteen miles from Baghdad, the British forces were in control of the Iraqi telephone switchboard. They planned to spread false information that "a powerful tank attack was on its way" to Baghdad. The fact that the British defeated the Iraqi army and the false information that heavy tank columns were advancing on Baghdad caused panic among the Iraqi pro- Nazi government and they fled to Persia and Turkey. Rashid Ali al - Gailani and Haj Amin al - Husseini and their entourage fled to Berlin and joined forces with the Nazis in Eastern Europe, especially Muslims in Bosnia.

The defeat of the Iraqi army by Glubb Pasha, commander of the British Legion in Jordan, and the flight of the leaders of the revolt to Iran, Turkey and Germany, with the British Army at the gates of Baghdad, left a political vacuum. Defeated and humiliated soldiers and the mob vented their anger against the Jews. They murdered 138 Jews, injured hundreds, and raped girls and women, and robbed and burned their property over the two days of Shavuot in 1-2 June 1941.

A returning monarchist government headed by Regent Abd al - Ilah and the pro- British Jamil al-Madfa'i were put in place. Iraqi soldiers opened live fire on the looters when they began to rob the stores of Muslim merchants. Dozens of looters were killed by troops loyal to the royal family Today some amateur leftists and Arab nationalists argue brazenly to flatter that about 200 Muslims were murdered to protect the Jews. Two scholars from Iraq are fighting unfounded allegations: journalist, broadcaster and writer Salim Fattal - whose uncle was murdered in the first hours of the Farhud wrote a book, An idol in the Temple of the Israeli Academy, in 2010: and Dr. Nissim Kazzaz wrote a book too. His father died and so did Salim Fattal's uncle when trying to rescue his racehorse-breeder partner at the Shiite neighborhood of Bab El – Sheikh in Baghdad.

After the Farhud the Iraqi government established a committee to investigate the events of the 1-2 June 1941 and submitted its report on July 8, 1941. A list of victims recorded by Dr. Zvi Yehuda came to 146. Some community sources put the number of victims at 179. We still do not have a final tally because from time to time families of relatives that are not included in the list come forward.

From a Lecture given at the Zalman Shazar Center in Jerusalem on 24/5/3012.

Friday, May 25, 2012

Moshe al-Nahari, murdered in 2008, dancing at a wedding (Photo: Reuven Schwartz)Lyn Julius reflects on what's been a bad week for the Jews of Yemen, with the murder of Aharon Zindani. Will it be enough to make the remaining Jews leave? Read her blog in the Times of Israel:

Earlier this week, Aharon Zindani lost his life. He was stabbed 12 times in the neck and stomach by a Yemeni Muslim shouting "you have put a spell on me" at Saawan market near the US embassy in northeast Sana’a, while Zindani was shopping with his children. He died later in hospital.

Zindani had emigrated from Yemen to Israel in the 1990s. For some reason – some say he had trouble adjusting to his new country – he moved back to Yemen.

But Zindani’s murder was not a clear-cut case of an innocent snuffed out by Islamic radicalism for being a Jew. Only last week, Chief Rabbi Yahya Yousef Mussa condemned Zindani for swindling the community in Sana’a out of desperately-needed funds. He and another Jew, the rabbi alleged, had falsified papers allowing them to access benefits reserved for Jews in Yemen. They were planning to return to Israel with their ill-gotten gains.

The sense that Zindani was a rogue embroiled in shady deals probably explains why the few dozen Jews living in the capital still apparently “do not feel they are in danger.”

Even if there is no love lost between Zindani and the 70-odd Jews in the city, their protestations that they feel safe in a country where life is cheap, sound increasingly hollow. Zindani’s murder would have brought back memories of another murder in December 2008, the reason for the Jews’ relocation to Sana’a in the first place.

A 30-year-old father of nine, Moshe Al-Nahari was shot by a man shouting, “convert or die!” Al-Nahari too had spent time in Israel and was planning to return there. But his father apparently dissuaded him at the last minute.

Following Al-Nahari’s murder the Jews were being increasingly harassed in their home town of Raida, where a low-level civil war was raging. President Saleh offered them sanctuary in the capital in two cramped blocks. But they are virtual prisoners in their compound, cannot support themselves and have been living on meager government hand-outs.

Although some of Al-Nahari’s children left for Israel, the rest of his family swore they would not leave until they had secured the death penalty for his murderer. At first, the courts ruled that the murderer was mentally unstable and only had to pay blood money. On appeal the courts sentenced the killer to death.

Following the murder of Aharon Zindani, the question on everyone’s lips is – why do these Jews stay there?

The vast majority of Yemen’s Jews were airlifted out to Israel in 1949 –50. In the mid-1990s, a wave of about 1,200 were resettled in Israel. But the remaining 300 Jews fell under the influence of the Satmar ultra-orthodox anti-Zionist sect. Jews could come and go relatively freely, but the Satmar warned against moving to decadent and secular Israel. They began paying Jews to stay in Yemen. As the security situation deteriorated still further, some 60 Jews have been admitted to the US and resettled in Monsey, the Satmar enclave in New York.

Now and again the Jews in Sana’a make protestations of loyalty to the regime and condemn the steady trickle of Jews deserting Yemen. The Sana’a Jews are behaving like archetypal ‘dhimmis’, owing their lives to the protection of the ruler. They would not betray the president who offered them hospitality by leaving. With the outbreak of the ‘Arab Spring’, however, President Abdullah Saleh has been toppled after 33 years in power. The leadership of the tiny community now think that the answer is for the Jews to have a say in the politics of the country. In a recent interview with CNN Arabic, Yemen Chief Rabbi Yahia Yousef Moussa called on the country’s President Hadi to allow the Jewish community and other minority groups to have seats in the country’s parliament. Such pronouncements smack of desperation. How much influence will a few dozen Jews have in a country of 23 million Muslims?

Thursday, May 24, 2012

At Shavuot, which Jews celebrate beginning Saturday night, it was customary for Jews in Iraq to go on a pilgrimage to the tomb of Ezekiel. But now that almost no Jews live in Iraq, it is feared that the shrine, which is holy to Muslims as well, will be turned into a mosque. Not so, says Sheila Raviv: she has received assurances from Sheikh Gahalivi, via Canon Andrew White, the so-called 'vicar of Baghdad'. In 2010, Canon White went personally to investigate the state of the shrine. This post in the Times of Israel is from 5 March, but hopefully, nothing much has changed since.

I met Canon White when he was the emissary of the former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey, here in Jerusalem. I was drawn to this larger-than-life, deeply religious man who also had great respect and understanding of Judaism, having spent a year in yeshiva during his theological studies in Cambridge University. Canon White’s current posting in Iraq is conceivably the toughest in the world, having seen the beginning and end of the Allied invasion of that country and also having lived through the reign and fall of Saddam Hussein. Having no fear of his delicate medical situation or the fact that he has a $30 million Fatwah on his head, Canon White walks with his head held high and cares for all who need him.

On Jerusalem Day 2010 Canon White visited Ezekiels Tomb, making the perilous three-hour journey with 30 bodyguards and numerous vehicles because I had asked him to do so, as a friend and as a Christian, to see if the rumors that local sheikhs had destroyed all reference to Judaism in the Tomb were actual. His call came as I sat in a huge traffic jam outside Mount Herzl. The Canon excitedly described the Tomb, telling me it was incredibly beautiful although in desperate need of renovation. The ancient Hebrew segments were in poor condition, but intact. He also told me that he had meetings with the local El Kifl sheikhs who wanted to retain all aspects of the Tomb and refurbish it.

Sheik Al Gahalivi (photo credit: courtesy)

Over the next period of time Canon White requested that I send him photographs of the original texts of the Tomb in Hebrew so that the artisans could copy them anew.

Last week Canon White called me from Iraq to tell me that Sheikh Al Gahalivi wanted to speak to me through an interpreter to thank me for setting the renovations in motion and for introducing him to Canon White.

Here’s what the Sheikh said:

I was praying for many years that someone would care about the Tomb. I wanted to preserve the Tomb for us all and prayed that I would find someone to communicate with out there in the world, and you sent Canon White to me and the work began in earnest. I want you to know that the Jewish shrine is safe with us, Ezekiel is important to us too. I want to build a visitors center around the Tomb to protect it and to make it ready for when Jews, Christians and Muslims can all visit the Tomb together. I just wanted to thank you for caring and being prepared to act. Shukran and Salaam

Through the interpreter, and Canon White, I thanked the Sheikh for his care and determination to retain the Jewish identity of this important shrine in a world that might cause him harm.

One should never assume that rumours of our “enemies” working to deny Jewish sites are automatically correct. One should always be open to the possibility that sometimes there are good folk of all religions who are trying to make this world a better place.

Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Today's Canadian National Post carries a plethora of letters on the Middle East, most responding to an article about Palestinian refugees that appeared in the Post on 19 May. This letter is a reply to another by one Rev. Giuliano. It makes the very valid point that the ethnic cleansing of Jews from areas of Palestine won by the Arabs in 1948 constitutes a breach of the Geneva Accords:

In his note, Rev. Giuliano offers reassurance that he recognizes the “profound atrocity” of the Holocaust. But more relevantly, he refuses in any way to acknowledge the Arab persecution of Jews in the Middle East and the Jewish refugees that resulted.

First, he simply does not mention the very broad expulsion of Jews to Israel from the Arab states. And secondly, and even more curiously, he does not mention that all Jews were cleansed from areas of Palestine where Arabs prevailed in 1948, a very obvious breach of the Geneva Accords.

In this regard he says only that “the Green Line does exist” and, ironically, that the presence of Jews — settlements — where they had been eliminated before 1967 violates international law. By contrast he asserts for Palestinian refugees a “Right to Return” — an “internationally recognized human right … to be resolved through negotiation”. Now, notwithstanding protestations about dignity for all, this suggests that Rev Giuliano applies very different standards to Jewish and Palestinian refugees. Not a very promising path to peace.

Interesting little snippet on AlterInfo.net that would have slipped under the media radar: the Kabyle leader Ferhat Mehenni paid an 'official' visit to Israel over the weekend, ostensibly to persuade Israel to 'set up a military base' in Kabylia, Algeria. Although it is not clear who Mehenni represents, and the idea of an Israeli military base in Kabylia belongs to the realms of fantasy, the visit is more evidence of the affinity Kabyles (Berbers) feel towards Israel in the common fight against Arabisation.

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Update: JTA News is reporting that the Jew Aharon Zindani was stabbed to death.

How much longer will the Jews of Sana'a pretend that they are safe? Today's stabbing would have brought back bad memories of the murder of Moshe al-Nahari (left), the reason why these 80 or so Jews relocated to the Yemeni capital in the first place. The Jerusalem Post has the story:(with thanks: Jeremy)

A member of the Jewish community in the Yemeni capital of Sanaa was stabbed and critically injured by a Muslim man accusing him of witchcraft on Tuesday, AFP quoted the man's son as saying. Army Radio quoted a friend of the victim as saying Aharon Zindani had died as a result of the stab wounds.

The 50-year-old Zindani “was stabbed at Saawan market near the US embassy in northeast Sanaa,” his son Yehya was quoted as saying. “He received stab wounds to his neck and stomach.

According to Yehya Zindani, his father was undergoing surgery for his wounds.

He described the attacker as a “well-known person who says my father has ruined and bewitched him.” According to Israeli media reports the attacker stabbed Zindani 12 times before being stopped by a group of men and detained.

A friend of Zindani, Shlomo Grafi, told Army Radio that he had been killed by a "member of al-Qaida."Grafi said that Zindani had returned to Yemen after he had made aliya and lived in Israel in the 1990s.

This year, as every year, the international media noted Nakba Day, the day when Palestinians mark the anniversary of the ‘catastrophe’ of Israel’s independence and the flight of 700,000 Arab refugees from the newborn state of Israel. Noticeable by its absence was any mention of the contemporaneous Jewish ‘nakba’, the flight of around 850,000 Jewish refugees from Arab countries. Lyn Julius examines media bias in the treatment of Jewish refugees in this guest post for HonestReporting:

Isabel Kershner of The New York Times is among the offenders. Leo Rennert wrote in American Thinker: “A fair reading of history demands that equal attention be paid to this Jewish “naqba.” But fairness is in short supply in The New York Times. There’s also no indication in Kershner’s piece about the different outcomes of these two “naqbas.”

Although the refugees were displaced in roughly similar numbers, the western press and media remain deaf, dumb and blind to the Jewish refugees. Do a search for “Palestinian refugees” on the influential BBC website and you get 1,197 results. Do a search for “Jewish refugees” and you get only 187 results.

Of these, the BBC contained only one story about Jews from Iraq and two references to Jewish refugees from Arab countries, neither of them emanating from BBC programs. With the exception of a 2011 radio program fronted by BBC2 controller Alan Yentob about Iraqi Jews, the only Jewish refugees discussed by the BBC website have been Holocaust survivors.

When the media does feature Sephardi or Mizrahi suffering in Arab lands, the implication is that Zionism caused their troubles. Before Israel, so the myth goes, ‘Jews and Arabs coexisted peacefully’ through the centuries.

According to David Harris of the American Jewish Committee, the western media are accomplices in a campaign to ‘deny or extinguish a Jewish presence deeper in the region’. A seasoned Middle Eastern affairs journalist had been surprised to discover that Harris’s wife had, as a Jew, been forcibly expelled from her native Libya. The journalist had no idea that Jews had ever lived in Libya nor that every trace of the millenarian Jewish presence had been obliterated almost overnight. So un-newsworthy was the story at the time, that The New York Times, Harris says, devoted exactly two tiny news briefs in 1967 to the end of the Libyan Jewish community.

The net effect of this bias by omission is that the average viewer, listener or reader has no clue that Jews lived in the Middle East and North Africa well before the Arabs, let alone were brutally ejected. He or she could be forgiven for thinking that Israel was established to atone for European sins, at Arab expense. But 50 percent of the Jewish population of Israel are there not because of the Nazis but because of the Arabs.

A jaw-dropping BBC reply to a complaint I made about the lack of coverage of Jewish refugees is that they simply aren’t enough of a stumbling block to peace:

The specific issue of Palestinian refugees is generally seen as one of the key stumbling blocks to finding a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. . … Jewish refugees… is not something that is generally viewed as a central issue in the peace process in the same way the Palestinian refugee issue is. Should the issue of Jewish refugees become an integral part of the negotiations in the Israeli-Arab peace negotiations or a stumbling block thereto, we would of course look at them in a more in-depth fashion.

Are we to conclude that if Jewish refugees blew themselves up in Arab supermarkets, they would get the attention they deserve?

In other ways, Jewish refugees are too much of a stumbling block. The media do not want the complication of the exodus of a million Jews from Arab countries, and their unresolved human rights, to cloud their simplistic ‘narrative’ of who the bad guys are in this conflict. You will scour the mainstream press in vain for reference to Jewish claims for compensation or restitution of property in Cairo, Jerusalem or Hebron.

The persistent failure of the media to give context to the Arab-Israeli conflict, and certainly to cover any history before 1967, means that Jews from the East are invisible. When Jerusalem Day is celebrated, you can bet that there will be more sob stories in the press about Palestinians wrongfully ejected from their homes.

Jews have neither presence nor rights in Arab countries, nor in eastern Jerusalem, and those parts of the West Bank where Jews lived before 1948. As far as the media are concerned, all Jews are settlers.

The biggest lie of an industry of lies, even in Israel, is the Palestinian Nakba. Yet nobody hears of the Jewish Nakba, which happened on a far larger scale, and was premeditated by the Arab League in 1947. The mass circulation daily Maariv columnist Ben Dror Yemini blames the Palestinian propaganda machine on the one hand, and ignorance on the other. (With thanks: Yoram)

"This distortion is their huge achievement. Because it creates a huge distortion. There was also a Jewish Nakba. After all, Jews experienced ethnic cleansing, a much more difficult experience than the flight and expulsion of Arabs from Palestine.

The property expropriated from the Jews in Arab countries was greater than the property left behind by the Arabs who left Israeli territory. The harassment of Jews from Arab lands was on a larger scale.

It also turns out that the mass deportation was in a master plan decided by the Arab League. But who has ever heard of it? Who knows of it? The decision to expel Arab Jews was made in 1947, before the mass flight of the Palestinians from the territories of the British Mandate.

Now, let's think - how often we heard last week, or in recent years, of the much more serious Jewish Nakba, and how much about the Nakba? The ratio is about a thousand to one.

How many in Israel and the world have heard of Deir Yassin, and how few about thepogrom against the Jews in Aden, which was four months earlier, in December 1947?In schools, across the country and worldwide the Khirbet Hizah is shown. Not the Khirbet Aden. There is no malice. Palestinians have a sophisticated propaganda machine here, on the one hand, and ignorance on the other.

In Israel and abroad, it's not just the media. Also books. Study in Israel is free of any mention of the Jewish Nakba. There is nothing.

Systematic brainwashing works. Israeli students are forced (to believe the lies) before they come to celebrate Literature at Tel Aviv (university). We are now seeing the grim results. The success of the industry of lies is not the number of participants in events commemorating the Nakba, on campuses in Tel Aviv or Haifa. These are still few. But the media and academic representatives are celebrating their presence. It's a tremendous lie.

Monday, May 21, 2012

A slide show of Baghdad throughout the 20th century, put together by Tony and Mira Rocca. The memoirs of Mira's mother, Violette Shamash, were published as Memories of Eden (With thanks Lisette).Might Iraqi Jews be able to recover their property?

An anonymous source in the Property/ Real Estate Claims Commission has told the Addustour newspaper (rough English translation here) that Iraqi Jews who emigrated in the middle of the last century to Israel have filed complains requesting compensation. It has been decided that a legal committee will be formed to draft a law to resolve this question.

Property Claims Law No. 13 of 2010 defined the tasks of the commission to look at cases brought by Iraqis whose property/ies have been confiscated and sold to citizens or given to government or party "Ba'ath" agencies. Properties belonging to Jews or citizens from the Gulf or foreigners are not included in this law.

After receiving complains from Iraqi Jews who immigrated to Europe, America, Israel and other countries, the authorities concerned have decided to form a committee of various disciplines, such as the real estate Justice Department affiliate and the Judicial Council, Internal affairs and the Foreign office, to start preparing legislation that guarantees an end to the problems of this segment in relation to their properties. The former regime did not confiscate or sell them, but froze them in the land registry. The Commission would not issue a law, as this is not its remit, but the duty of Parliament.

A spokesman for the World Organisation of Jews from Iraq fears that the Jews are just one of many groups demanding restitution, and that the focus will be on foreign owners and those from the Gulf States.

Following the US invasion of Iraq, the Iraq Property Claims Commission was set up. Anyone who had lost property since 1968, when the Ba'ath regime seized power, was entitled to file a claim and send the information to an address in Switzerland. But the website of the IPCC and its address no longer exist, and not a single Jewish claimant has received any news. No provision was ever made for the compensation or restitution of the bulk of Jewish property, frozen in the early 1950s.

Sunday, May 20, 2012

David Littman with his wife Gisele and baby Diana on a secret mission in Casablanca, June 1961

Point of No Return deeply regrets to report that Jews from Arab Countries today lost one of their great champions, historian David Littman, aged 78. Based in Lausanne, Switzerland, he was an energetic spokesman for Jewish human rights, regularly confronting the UN in Geneva, and the author of several pamphlets, articles and book chapters. Married to the pioneering researcher into Dhimmitude, Bat Yeor, Littman gave his wife unstinting support in her work.

David Littman was born into a wealthy family in the UK and was educated at Canford School and Trinity College Dublin. He and his brother Louis, founder of the Littman Library, married two Egyptian-born refugees, Gisele and Colette Orebi, in the 1950s.

Just before he fell ill with leukaemia, Littman co-wrote with Professor Paul Fenton an 800-page book called L'Exil au Maghreb. The book, which features original documents casting a spotlight on the harsh treatment of Jews in Morocco before 1912, was enthusiastically received.

Littman will probably be best remembered, however, for his part in the 1961 rescue of 530 Moroccan-Jewish children in Operation Mural, a secret Mossad mission. He posed as a tennis-playing, Christian English gentleman living with his wife and baby in Casablanca. He was working on a book on Operation Mural at the time of his death. The details of the operation only came to light in 1986, when a documentary was made. Littman was granted public recognition by the Israeli government when he was awarded the coveted 'Hero of Silence' medal in 2009.

David Littman is survived by his wife Bat Yeor, his daughters Ariane and Diana and three grand-daughters.

For two property owners who won an Israeli Supreme Court battle recently to regain their property, Jerusalem Day gives particular cause for celebration. Report by AFP:

JERUSALEM — Israel's Supreme Court on Monday ordered two Palestinians to leave their properties in the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City, ruling that the properties were owned by Jews, their lawyer told AFP.

Lawyer Mohammed Dahleh said the court had rejected his clients' appeals, and ruled that Ghazi Zalum's house and Ismail Wazwaz's shop had been owned by Jews in the period before the establishment of Israel in 1948, with the properties later falling into Jordan's hands.

"It went through the Magistrates Court, the District Court and now the Supreme Court," Dahleh said, adding that the court had also ordered the Palestinians to pay all the legal costs.

Both properties are in the Al-Qarameh neighbourhood between the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Al Aqsa mosque compound.

There was no immediate Israeli confirmation of the ruling, and it was not clear who would take over the properties.

Zalum told AFP there had been a systematic takeover by settlers of properties in the area.

"With my evacuation, Israel has evacuated half of the Al-Qarameh neighbourhood and Aqbat al-Khaldiyya as part of an organised policy of emptying the Old City," he charged.

"It is more of a political issue than an Arab or Jewish property issue. This move comes with the announcement of the elections and is a message to Israelis saying: we are liberating Jerusalem from the Arabs," he said, referring to a decision by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to call early elections this September.

The identity of the Jewish owners who won the court battle were not immediately clear.

Saturday, May 19, 2012

I suppose we should be popping the champagne corks at the news that the reputable French newspaper Le Monde has finally published an article on the Jewish 'Nakba'. The bad news is that the journalist, Laurent Zecchini, thought fit to consult two new historians for their views on a subject they know disappointingly little about, or whose 'radical' politics make them dismissive of a 'far-right' party initiative to raise awareness of this issue. With input from Benny Morris (left) and Tom Segev (right), no wonder Zecchini concludes that the deputy foreign minister's Danny Ayalon push to make justice for the Jewish refugees official policy is doomed to be counter-productive. Here is a Google Translation from French. My comment follows below:

My comment: Benny Morris inexplicably puts the figure of Jews who fled Arab countries at 700, 000, lower than any official estimate. His assertion that the international community is less likely to compensate Jewish than Arab refugees because they are thought to be 'rich' is, frankly, jaw-dropping. The international community has yet to react, and such reasoning would be little short of antisemitic - and an insult to those who left Arab countries with one suitcase and 20 dollars in their pockets to spend years in ma'abarot ( transit camps). If the Jews no longer qualify as refugees, it would seem a travesty to reward Arab states for preserving the anomalous refugee status of Palestinians, in contravention of every humanitarian norm, while penalising Israel for 'doing the right thing' and resettling the Jews as full citizens.

Tom Segev trots out the old chestnut that these were Jews returning to their ancestral homeland in Israel; but Le Monde's readership would be aware that the vast majority of France's half a million Jews came there as refugees from North Africa, and can hardly be described as motivated by Zionism. Nor can the thousands of Jews from Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia struggling to survive in working-class areas of Paris or Marseille be summarily stripped of their rights. Benny Morris's dismissal of Yisrael Beteinu's Jewish refugees campaign as 'counter-productive' and 'political propaganda', does not seem rooted in logic, but smacks of a knee-jerk dislike of the 'far-right'.

Friday, May 18, 2012

A visit by the radical preacher Youssef al-Qaradawi to the island of Djerba was hastily relocated to the mainland for fear he could have sabotaged the annual Lag La'Omer pilgrimage which took place last week - just one of the challenges facing the fragile Tunisian-Jewish community. The Djerba pilgrimage, which this year attracted about 300 European Jews (no Israelis), was attended by the Tunisian Tourism minister, a reminder of its commercial importance to the country's tourist industry. Gil Shefler reports in the Jerusalem Post:

La Goulette, Tunisia – Over a dozen men meet on a Saturday evening at a house of worship tucked away in a quiet alley in this seaside suburb of Tunis. They pray and sing songs and break bread together in a building that most locals do not even know exists.

And while the entrance to the sanctuary is diminutive and the service respectful of the Muslim- majority surroundings, they do so freely, merrily and without fear.

This is Beit Mordechai Synagogue and its congregants are members of the country’s 1,500 Jews, the second-largest such community in the Arab world after Morocco. They are what remains of a group that numbered over 100,000 people at its peak in the 1940s and dates back to antiquity. They live good lives, working in commerce and development or providing religious services, but their prosperity, not to mention their continued existence as a community, has been called into serious question over the past year and a half.

Since the uprising that ousted longtime autocrat Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in January 2011, most Jews in Tunisia have been vacillating between hope and fear. Hope because the demise of a corrupt dictatorship – even if it protected them from physical harm – and the advent of democracy might help create a better, more just society. Fear because the subsequent rise in popularity of Islamists and of Salafists, who adhere to an even more radical form of Islam, might create an atmosphere hostile to Jews.

The sweeping victory in the country’s first-ever democratic elections last October by Ennahda, an Islamist party formerly banned by the regime, had people talking at the synagogue in La Goulette.

“I still feel safer here right now than I do in Paris where I often feel threatened by French Arabs,” says Maxime Journo, a Tunisian-born concert promoter who divides his time between Tunis and Paris.

“Perhaps, but there’s no denying the situation is less certain for us than it was under Ben Ali even though he was what he was,” responds another congregant. “We must wait for further developments and see.”

A big test of the Islamist-led government’s attitude toward religious minorities took place several days earlier in Djerba, the picturesque Mediterranean island where the majority – 900 – of the country’s Jews live. Last year the annual Lag Ba’omer pilgrimage to El Ghriba, the island’s ancient synagogue, was canceled due to security fears. The question this year is whether the new government will be willing or able to ensure the rite continues.

“Celebrated for hundreds of years, this religious rite is an achievement that should not change, because it illustrates the openness of Tunisia to the world,” AP quoted Tourism Minister Elyes Fakhfakh as saying last month. “It is an achievement of the revolution, which established freedom of worship.”

Still, an overbooking almost ruined the government’s painstaking efforts to prove they would protect the Jewish community.

Youssef Qaradawi, a Qatari-based Egyptian radical preacher barred from the US, the UK and France, planned to hold a gathering in Djerba on May 5, just four days before the Jewish event.

“We had to do something,” Roger Bismuth, a leader of the Jewish community in Tunis, says after the fact. “If [Qaradawi] had said anything wrong it would have gone badly for the pilgrimage, and they listened to us.”

The cleric’s gathering was relocated to the mainland, the crisis was narrowly averted and the pilgrimage went ahead as planned.

At the El Ghriba synagogue on Lag Ba’omer, a set of unique Tunisian traditions and superstitions are on display. Women who want to bear children write prayers on boiled eggs that are then placed in a small cavern in the center of the sanctuary. Men sprinkle boukha, a fig-based alcohol, on their faces, hands and inside their pockets.

“It brings good luck,” says one.

A few hundred worshipers dance with the Torah outside the ancient synagogue during the day and pray and feast within its sacred confines at night.

“To me, there is something magical about Jews and Arabs living together like they do here,” says Guy Tzinmann, a French Jew who has come from Paris to participate.” If you don’t come with an Israeli passport they don’t give you any trouble and, unlike Algeria, where my mother is from, I can come here to visit.”

The police presence, aimed at preventing attacks like the one carried out here by al-Qaida in 2002 that left 21 dead, is considerable. There are probably more security officers than there are worshipers.

Like most religious pilgrimages, there is a strong commercial aspect here. For the Trabelsi family, which runs the synagogue and organizes the gathering, it is an important source of income.

“We would have liked many more to come,” says Renee Trabelsi. “In the past thousands did, but we’re happy with the turnout.”

It is telling that the most important guest this year is not Jewish. When the tourism minister, Fakhfakh, shows up on the second day, he is greeted by participants singing the national anthem.

Jacob Lellouche, the Jewish owner of the popular restaurant Mami Lily in La Goulette, looks like a musketeer. Porthos, the fat one, to be precise. And it’s not just because of his thick mane of hair, his carefully trimmed French beard or his big – not overweight – build, but because of the joviality, affability and joie de vivre he radiates. When he laughs the earth shakes a little, and when he does the rounds, speaking to almost every client who sits down for dinner at the old Italian villa he made into a restaurant, he moves with surprising agility for a man of his size.

“When I opened this restaurant 15 years ago, I wanted to remind people of what was once here when many Jews lived in Tunisia,” he says, sinking down deep into his chair. “Almost everyone here has his own memory of living with Jews.”

Lellouche specializes in the distinctive cuisine of Jewish Tunisians. Appetizers include homemade matbouha, piquant carrot salad and, of course, the ubiquitous baguette, part of the enduring French influence on this country. Main dishes include thin, spicy merguez sausages, whole grilled fish freshly plucked from the nearby sea and a thick, green stew whose name I do not catch.

Reem Tamimi sits at a table in the back of the restaurant, typing away furiously on her laptop. The co-founder of Dar el- Dekhra, a society documenting the Jewish heritage of Tunisia, has had a busy week.

Its first-ever exhibition opened at an arts venue in the medina, Tunis’s old quarter, earlier in the week.

“So far between 300 and 400 people came, and tomorrow is the last day,” she says. “Yesterday a black woman, someone from the lower class, came to the exhibition and cried. I asked her why and she said her parents used to listen to a song we were playing sung by a Jewish singer.”

Starting a group documenting Jewish heritage in Arab-Muslim Tunisia is no simple matter. Tamimi’s project might be likened to Zochrot, the organization in Israel that commemorates Arab villages whose inhabitants fled in 1948. One may well wonder why a Muslim photographer would invest herself in such an endeavor, but to Tamimi the answer is as clear as a cup of boukha.

“If you do not know your past, you know nothing about your present or future,” she explains. “My great-greatgreat- grandfather was Jewish, but I have been Muslim for seven generations.

Knowledge of history and particularly Jewish history in Tunisia helps all Tunisian, regardless of their religion.”

Tamimi’s sister-in-arms is Sonia Fellous, a Tunisian-born Jew living in Paris who researches religions. She is one of four Jewish core members of the society. The other 11 are Muslim.

“This is the only organization promoting Jewish history that has more Muslim members than Jews,” she says proudly.

Indeed, a short conversation with the two women reveals the extent of contributions by Jews to the country. The first filmmaker in Tunisia was Jewish. He also happened to introduce the bicycle to the country. Several important singers, such as the Semama sisters and Habiba Masika, were Jews. Members of the community were part of the country’s social and business elite.

“It was easier for them to go between the East and the West,” Fellous explains.

The Jewish community of Tunisia has a fabled past, but what of its future? Fellous sighs. It is clear she thinks that sooner or later her co-religionists will follow the path that led her out of the country, but it is Tamimi who gives a resolute and surprising answer to the question.

“Yes, certainly there is a future,” she says. “Otherwise, what am I fighting for?” THE THORN in the side of Jewish-Arab relations in Tunisia is the same as it is throughout the Arab world: Israel.

Conversations with Tunisians, rich and poor, religious and secular, educated and uneducated, seem to point toward a pretty uniform opinion: The Jewish state has no right to exist.

At an upscale fish restaurant in La Marche, a well-heeled coastal town near the capital, I meet a group of four friendly, educated and worldly Tunisians for dinner where they explain why Israel as we know it will sooner or later disappear.

“Israel is a theocracy like Saudi Arabia and Iran,” explains Youssef, a former Fullbright scholar with an Ivy League education.

“There will eventually be a one-state solution the same way it happened in South Africa. It is inevitable.”

The group, consisting of human rights activists and policy wonks, is curious to learn about public opinion in Israel. They ask what will happen with Iran and what Israelis think about the possibility of the creation of a binational Jewish-Arab state.

But they seem bitterly disappointed, even hurt, to hear that that kind of discourse takes place only on the fringe of Jewish society and is considered by the vast majority to be both impractical and undesirable.

Nadia, one of the dinner guests, who has lived in Jerusalem where she worked with an international aid agency, has Israeli friends. “Many of them would support such a solution,” she says.

It is hard to reconcile just how differently things are seen in the East and the West.

Western military intervention in Libya against the tyrant Muammar Gaddafi, for instance, was harmful and unnecessary, they say. They reject the notion that Gaddafi would have crushed the insurgency had France and the US not launched strikes against his forces. Such action did more harm than good, as it did in Iraq and almost everywhere else the West has intervened in the Middle East, they argue. For those reasons they oppose any kind of military intervention in Syria’s civil war.

While the group feels animosity toward Israel, they say their attitudes toward Jews in general are warm.

“I would love all the Jews who left Tunisia to return,” declared Nadia.

I ask her why she feels that way about Tunisian Jews whereas the roughly two million non-Jewish emigres leave her indifferent. She says it is because Jews contributed to a prosperous, vibrant and progressive society. Their return would help make the country a better place.

The dinner ends somewhat sourly. Not even a shot of boukha manages to get rid of the bitter taste that the tense debate leaves.

Half an hour later we are at a party at a bar by the beach where a band is playing the timeless hit, “La Bamba.” The partygoers are a good mix of young men and woman, straight and gay, locals and expats. It is an integral part of Tunisia, but at the same time it has nothing to do with the narrow alleys in the old medina of Tunis where veiled women shop for halal meat and bearded men leisurely walk to the mosque. The scene is yet another reminder that the Middle East has no problem containing countless paradoxes, and it makes me think of another country in the region that I know is similar in this sense.

The Jewish community in Tunisia is roughly divided into three groups: Rich and secular Jews in Tunis, religious Jews of modest means in Djerba and a group of old people who remain here by virtue of having nowhere else to go. The Jewish oldage home is located in a stately residence around the corner from the synagogue in La Goulette.

Roger Krief, 87, is one of the 40 or so residents at the home. The former jeweler says he has family in many places, including in France and Israel, but does not elaborate on his life story. The past can be a sore subject.

Like most institutions for the sick and elderly it is not a happy place to visit, but it provides a very vital service to the community that could not exist without the help of their brethren overseas.

“Our cooperation with the Tunis community is good,” says Yechiel Bar Chaim, an official with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. “We don’t work independently there, but we work with them to help provide them with means.”

Just around the corner at the tiny synagogue in La Goulette, the sounds of Hebrew echo loudly between the walls.

“Let them hear a little,” the young rabbi politely asks Sa’adon, his elder.

They reach a Talmudic compromise without exchanging a word. The door is left half open – or half closed, depending on your point of view.

The dilemma of the door at the synagogue is a good metaphor for the state of Tunisian Jewry. How openly can its members live in the country and how sure can they be that someone or something might not come through the door tomorrow, bringing their singing to an end The singing reaches a crescendo and then comes to an abrupt stop.

“Everyone is talking about Islamists and Salafists all the time,” one of the congregants declares in French. “But let the world know that in Tunisia, the Jews are singing.”

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Introduction

In just 50 years, almost a million Jews, whose communities stretch back up to 3,000 years, have been 'ethnically cleansed' from 10 Arab countries. These refugees outnumber the Palestinian refugees two to one, but their narrative has all but been ignored. Unlike Palestinian refugees, they fled not war, but systematic persecution. Seen in this light, Israel, where some 50 percent of the Jewish population descend from these refugees and are now full citizens, is the legitimate expression of the self-determination of an oppressed indigenous, Middle Eastern people.This website is dedicated to preserving the memory of the near-extinct Jewish communities, which can never return to what and where they once were - even if they wanted to. It will attempt to pass on the stories of the Jewish refugees and their current struggle for recognition and restitution. Awareness of the injustice done to these Jews can only advance the cause of peace and reconciliation.(Iran: once an ally of Israel, the Islamic Republic of Iran is now an implacable enemy and numbers of Iranian Jews have fallen drastically from 80,000 to 20,000 since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Their plight - and that of all other communities threatened by Islamism - does therefore fall within the scope of this blog.)